lenitat's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
emotional
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
sad
fast-paced
4.0
maliablue's review against another edition
4.0
A thoughtful essay that is especially powerful when read while in Venice.
mallaeuswastaken's review against another edition
4.0
This is quite short — only 56 pages — but it evokes so keenly and succinctly the heart and soul of the city of Venice that it is no more or no less than perfect.
Marías (and by extension his translator) have a way with words to say the least, and his descriptions of Venice, its people and its presence is quintessential travel writing — in other words, one gets the sense that they must travel there immediately, while also feeling as though they have been there before.
Marías (and by extension his translator) have a way with words to say the least, and his descriptions of Venice, its people and its presence is quintessential travel writing — in other words, one gets the sense that they must travel there immediately, while also feeling as though they have been there before.
mallaeus's review against another edition
4.0
This is quite short — only 56 pages — but it evokes so keenly and succinctly the heart and soul of the city of Venice that it is no more or no less than perfect.
Marías (and by extension his translator) have a way with words to say the least, and his descriptions of Venice, its people and its presence is quintessential travel writing — in other words, one gets the sense that they must travel there immediately, while also feeling as though they have been there before.
Marías (and by extension his translator) have a way with words to say the least, and his descriptions of Venice, its people and its presence is quintessential travel writing — in other words, one gets the sense that they must travel there immediately, while also feeling as though they have been there before.
drifterontherun's review against another edition
4.0
I'm 8 books behind schedule! Gosh, this isn't good! I've been traveling, and I don't read much when I travel, though I really should. I get too caught up in planning every aspect of a trip so that any time I have is spent researching online rather than reading. But now I'm 8 books behind schedule, so that's got to change.
This is a book I managed to finish on my trip. Of course, it helps that it's only 55 pages, but hey, it's a book, right? So it counts! I picked this up in the museum gift shop at the Palazzo Ducale (Doge's Palace) in Venice. They had many books, including Jan Morris' book on Venice that I've been meaning to read for some time, but this one was six euros, 55 pages, and by an author who I really want to like.
I say "want to" because my first experience with Javier Marias didn't end so well. Or, I should say, it didn't end at all because I never finished the book. It was that bad. But maybe, I reasoned, nonfiction would work out better.
Nonfiction ... this is really more of an essay on how much Marias loves Venice. There's basically an entire genre of these books now, but I love Venice too and I was currently in Venice so I would read about why Marias loved Venice and see if it was for the same reasons that I loved Venice.
Before that initial disastrous read I'd been meaning to read Marias for many years. Then, last year, I just happened to be at the Louisiana Museum in Denmark at the same time as their annual literary festival and Marias was one of the people being interviewed that day. So I went and bought the only two books the gift shop had of his in English just in order to get them signed.
I remember Marias being a rather acerbic speaker. He's got a bone to pick with all of humanity seemingly, and many of his answers that night came off as somewhat haughty and pretentious, or so it seemed to me. But there was something about him that I liked, though maybe it was just the hilariously haughty and pretentious way in which he answered some of the questions, sometimes with just a single word.
I remember, for example, the female interviewer asking him about whether he had a dog. He snorted and replied "no" so derisively that it was clear, in that single word, he found people who had dogs to be pathetic and dogs themselves to be nothing more than temporary comfort for emotionally weak individuals. Or at least, that's how I interpreted his answer.
And I liked that. I was raised with a plethora of pets, but now I don't have any. All my friends, practically everyone I know for that matter, does seem to have a dog, or maybe a cat, and I do find myself amused by what a fuss they tend to make about it.
But it's such an unpopular thing to say, what I just said, what Marias implied with his "no", that I admired him for it. I admired him for taking such a widely unpopular public stance on the sacred cow that is domesticated animals.
I mention all that just to say that Marias writes just as he spoke that night. Condescendingly, with a-none-too-subtle air of superiority. He loves Venice, and he loves Venetians, but he agrees, it seems, with what he sees as a Venetian tendency to view outsiders (that is, that not insignificant slice of humanity that isn't born in or local to Venice) as inferior and unworthy of such a city.
Maybe we're all unworthy of such a city, but try telling that to the swathes of day-trippers who plague it. Do they really appreciate the city, its history, culture, and people? Probably not.
I try to show, by reading books such as this one, that I am worthy, but I fear it's a futile pursuit in the end. The foreigner has to sacrifice something in order to truly be worthy of a place like Venice, and even years spent living there cannot make up for the great privilege, in the eyes of Marias' Venetians, of having been born there.
Love him or loathe him (my own feelings lie somewhere in the middle), one has to at least admire Marias for his candid bitterness.
This is a book I managed to finish on my trip. Of course, it helps that it's only 55 pages, but hey, it's a book, right? So it counts! I picked this up in the museum gift shop at the Palazzo Ducale (Doge's Palace) in Venice. They had many books, including Jan Morris' book on Venice that I've been meaning to read for some time, but this one was six euros, 55 pages, and by an author who I really want to like.
I say "want to" because my first experience with Javier Marias didn't end so well. Or, I should say, it didn't end at all because I never finished the book. It was that bad. But maybe, I reasoned, nonfiction would work out better.
Nonfiction ... this is really more of an essay on how much Marias loves Venice. There's basically an entire genre of these books now, but I love Venice too and I was currently in Venice so I would read about why Marias loved Venice and see if it was for the same reasons that I loved Venice.
Before that initial disastrous read I'd been meaning to read Marias for many years. Then, last year, I just happened to be at the Louisiana Museum in Denmark at the same time as their annual literary festival and Marias was one of the people being interviewed that day. So I went and bought the only two books the gift shop had of his in English just in order to get them signed.
I remember Marias being a rather acerbic speaker. He's got a bone to pick with all of humanity seemingly, and many of his answers that night came off as somewhat haughty and pretentious, or so it seemed to me. But there was something about him that I liked, though maybe it was just the hilariously haughty and pretentious way in which he answered some of the questions, sometimes with just a single word.
I remember, for example, the female interviewer asking him about whether he had a dog. He snorted and replied "no" so derisively that it was clear, in that single word, he found people who had dogs to be pathetic and dogs themselves to be nothing more than temporary comfort for emotionally weak individuals. Or at least, that's how I interpreted his answer.
And I liked that. I was raised with a plethora of pets, but now I don't have any. All my friends, practically everyone I know for that matter, does seem to have a dog, or maybe a cat, and I do find myself amused by what a fuss they tend to make about it.
But it's such an unpopular thing to say, what I just said, what Marias implied with his "no", that I admired him for it. I admired him for taking such a widely unpopular public stance on the sacred cow that is domesticated animals.
I mention all that just to say that Marias writes just as he spoke that night. Condescendingly, with a-none-too-subtle air of superiority. He loves Venice, and he loves Venetians, but he agrees, it seems, with what he sees as a Venetian tendency to view outsiders (that is, that not insignificant slice of humanity that isn't born in or local to Venice) as inferior and unworthy of such a city.
Maybe we're all unworthy of such a city, but try telling that to the swathes of day-trippers who plague it. Do they really appreciate the city, its history, culture, and people? Probably not.
I try to show, by reading books such as this one, that I am worthy, but I fear it's a futile pursuit in the end. The foreigner has to sacrifice something in order to truly be worthy of a place like Venice, and even years spent living there cannot make up for the great privilege, in the eyes of Marias' Venetians, of having been born there.
Love him or loathe him (my own feelings lie somewhere in the middle), one has to at least admire Marias for his candid bitterness.
arirang's review
2.0
Venice, An Interior, although published separately, is part of a longer book of essays by Javier Marias, collected and translated into English as [b:Between Eternities|34836901|Between Eternities|Javier Marías|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1496923162s/34836901.jpg|56067098] forthcoming later in the year. (see my review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2193951014)
Marias made multiple trips to Venice in the 2nd half of the 1980s for reasons he doesn't divulge in this book, but which other sources suggest was likely a love affair, and wrote "a good part" of the novels The Man of Feeling and All Souls there, so that the city became to him a temporary 2nd home.
And consequently Marias's focus in this essay, originally published in El Pais in the 1990s, is not so much on tourist Venice as life for those who live there: individuals who are not content with the mere three or five or seven days that every mortal should set aside on the vast diary of his or her biography to be spent in the one place on the world that, of left unvisited, could tarnish the worthy portrait of someone who throughout his life - however decent or dissolute - has always done his aesthetic duty!
Javier Marias is one of my favourite living authors, and I read this book on a trip to Venice, one of my favourite cities, so this was shooting into an open goal, which may explain the small sense of disappointment I had. This is very good but not great - the prose doesn't soar to the heights of Marias's novels and although it invokes Venice beautifully it doesn't manage to dethrone works such as [b:Venice|953994|Venice|Jan Morris|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1348951331s/953994.jpg|938904] by Jan Morris as the definitive accounts
The translation by [a:Margaret Jull Costa|24758|Margaret Jull Costa|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1364673971p2/24758.jpg], recent and long-overdue winner of the Best Translated Book Award, is, of course, as flawless as ever.
Marias's most original insight is into the pyschology of the Venetians, caused by the fact that Venice, La Serenissima, remains serenely preserved and undeveloped:
The terrible certainly that something we can actually see will always be there and will always remain the same, without the admixture of unease and uncertainty inherent in all human enterprises and communities, without the possibility of a new life or of an unprecedented rebirth, of growth or explosion, without the possibility, in short of any surprise or change, means that Venetians see life from 'the viewpoint of eternity'.
...
I suppose the only way of making that certainty and that viewpoint bearable is to give in to the temptation of believing in the imminent destruction of what will doubtless survive us, and to foster the threat of total extinction. Each time I arrive in Venice, I find the population alarmed about something or other, be it an old threat or a new.
Although one of his most recommended sights rather disproves his theory that the City never changes (as the author acknowledges in a brief afterward to the English edition). He advises the traveller to venture to the end of the Zattare, and to look over to the Guidecca to see the amazing sight of the dark ruins of the once thriving Molino Stucky flour factory, closed since 1955 and which, in Marias's account, languishes without hope of redevelopment.
Doing so in 2017, as I did, one is instead greeted by the blazing lights of the Hilton Molino Stucky Venice Hotel, opened in 2007.
Worthwhile, although i would recommend waiting for Between Eternities unless the reader has (I had both) a burning desire to read anything by Marias as soon as it is published, or a specific interest in Venice.
Marias made multiple trips to Venice in the 2nd half of the 1980s for reasons he doesn't divulge in this book, but which other sources suggest was likely a love affair, and wrote "a good part" of the novels The Man of Feeling and All Souls there, so that the city became to him a temporary 2nd home.
And consequently Marias's focus in this essay, originally published in El Pais in the 1990s, is not so much on tourist Venice as life for those who live there: individuals who are not content with the mere three or five or seven days that every mortal should set aside on the vast diary of his or her biography to be spent in the one place on the world that, of left unvisited, could tarnish the worthy portrait of someone who throughout his life - however decent or dissolute - has always done his aesthetic duty!
Javier Marias is one of my favourite living authors, and I read this book on a trip to Venice, one of my favourite cities, so this was shooting into an open goal, which may explain the small sense of disappointment I had. This is very good but not great - the prose doesn't soar to the heights of Marias's novels and although it invokes Venice beautifully it doesn't manage to dethrone works such as [b:Venice|953994|Venice|Jan Morris|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1348951331s/953994.jpg|938904] by Jan Morris as the definitive accounts
The translation by [a:Margaret Jull Costa|24758|Margaret Jull Costa|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1364673971p2/24758.jpg], recent and long-overdue winner of the Best Translated Book Award, is, of course, as flawless as ever.
Marias's most original insight is into the pyschology of the Venetians, caused by the fact that Venice, La Serenissima, remains serenely preserved and undeveloped:
The terrible certainly that something we can actually see will always be there and will always remain the same, without the admixture of unease and uncertainty inherent in all human enterprises and communities, without the possibility of a new life or of an unprecedented rebirth, of growth or explosion, without the possibility, in short of any surprise or change, means that Venetians see life from 'the viewpoint of eternity'.
...
I suppose the only way of making that certainty and that viewpoint bearable is to give in to the temptation of believing in the imminent destruction of what will doubtless survive us, and to foster the threat of total extinction. Each time I arrive in Venice, I find the population alarmed about something or other, be it an old threat or a new.
Although one of his most recommended sights rather disproves his theory that the City never changes (as the author acknowledges in a brief afterward to the English edition). He advises the traveller to venture to the end of the Zattare, and to look over to the Guidecca to see the amazing sight of the dark ruins of the once thriving Molino Stucky flour factory, closed since 1955 and which, in Marias's account, languishes without hope of redevelopment.
Doing so in 2017, as I did, one is instead greeted by the blazing lights of the Hilton Molino Stucky Venice Hotel, opened in 2007.
Worthwhile, although i would recommend waiting for Between Eternities unless the reader has (I had both) a burning desire to read anything by Marias as soon as it is published, or a specific interest in Venice.
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